people often have a highly developed aesthetic taste. How can this
difference be accounted for?

Starting with the emotional appreciation of art as primary, we can
account for it in this wise. It is a familiar phenomenon in the mental
life for a concept or idea of an emotional experience to take the place
of that experience. What man has not rejoiced when the simple and cold
judgment, "I suffered then," has come to supplant a recurring torment?
Or who that has lived constantly with a sick person has not observed
how, looking on the face of pain, inevitably the mere comment, "he is
in distress," comes to supplant the liveliest sympathetic thrill? There
are many reasons for this. The idea or judgment is a less taxing thing
than an emotion, and so is substituted for it in the mind, which
everywhere seeks economy of effort. The idea is also more efficient
from a practical point of view, because it leads directly to action
and does not divert and waste energy in diffused and useless movements.
The physician simply recognizes the states of mind of his patients,
he does not sympathize with them. Finally our own reactions to an
objectified emotion may interfere with the emotion. If, for example,
we see an angry man, our own fear of him may entirely supplant our
sympathetic feeling of his anger. In general, in our dealings with our
fellow men, we are too busy with our attitudes and plans with reference
to them, and too much concerned with economizing our emotional energy,
to get a sympathetic intuition of their inner life, and so are content
with an intellectual recognition of it. Now this habit of substituting
the more rapid and economical process of judgment for the longer and
more taxing one of sympathy, is carried over into the world of art.

Nevertheless, the world of art is a region especially fitted for
_einfuehlung._ For there the need for quick action, which in life